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St. Cloud State University
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Court rules on admissions
By Eric O'Link
Published:
Thursday, June 26, 2003
The United States Supreme Court announced a landmark decision Monday on affirmative action in university admissions policies - a decision that will have repercussions for many schools across the country.
Colleges and universities may continue to include race as a factor when considering students for admission, the court said. However, the court deemed that blind, systematic methods of giving minority students an admissions "boost" - such as the University of Michigan's undergraduate points system - are unconstitutional.
The court's decision gave a final answer to cases filed against the University of Michigan in 1997. Allegations were twofold: one, admissions policies at the University of Michigan's law school gave minorities preferential treatment; and two, the school gave undergraduate minority applicants an unfair advantage of 20 "points" for their ethnic status. These "ethnic points" carried more weight than some academic considerations.
The court struck down the "point" system 6-3. In the law school case, however, by a vote of 5-4, the court narrowly upheld that ethnicity may be considered during the admissions process on a case-by-case basis. Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter and John Paul Stevens voted in favor of ethnic consideration.
According to USA Today, as O'Connor announced the court's ruling, she "emphasized the importance of campuses being open to all races, as well as colleges' goal of providing diverse, well-trained graduates for business, the military and other American institutions."
In the decision, O'Connor wrote, "Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realized."
The ruling on the law school case was quickly billed as one of the most important civil rights decisions in 25 years.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only black member, wrote a caustic dissent to the majority opinion of the law school case. He began with a quote from abolitionist Frederick Douglass, "What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice."
"Like Douglass," Thomas wrote, "I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators. ... No one would argue that a university could set up a lower general admission standard and then impose heightened requirements only on black applicants. Similarly, a university may not maintain a high admission standard and grant exemptions to favored races."
No changes at SCSU
While Monday's decision may have lasting effects at colleges and universities around the country, little will change at SCSU and other schools across Minnesota.
The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) board prohibits questions regarding age and race from admissions applications for schools within the MnSCU system, including SCSU, said Katie Landwehr, associate director of SCSU admissions.
"For our admission purposes, it's strictly academic criteria and nothing else," Landwehr said.
That is not to say that SCSU does not collect ethnic information from prospective students, but standards about when the information is collected and when it is available to administrators are rigid.
Landwehr explained that as SCSU first makes contact with prospective students, the students are given an information card they can fill out and return to the admissions office. A question about race is included on the card, though whether students choose to answer it is optional.
If prospective students do indicate their ethnic background, the admissions office can send them information relating to specific opportunities at SCSU for students of their ethnicity, namely scholarships.
But once a prospective student formally enters the application phase of admissions, all private information about them - including ethnicity - is blocked within the admissions computer system. Until the student has been accepted, the information is unavailable so factors such as race will not influence admissions decisions.
"It can have no bearing whatsoever on the admissions phase," Landwehr said. "Using the specific ethnicity issue, we can collect it before (the student has) committed and after they've committed, but not while we're making the decision about whether or not they can be admitted." She stressed that questions about any private information are always optional.
Legitimized questions
Landwehr said that the SCSU admissions office has discussed the University of Michigan's practices and that, as an office, it disagrees with the school's admissions process.
She also said that the Supreme Court's decision will aid SCSU in recruitment efforts; the court has "legitimized" the ethnicity questions that admissions asks students during the recruitment phase.
"If we've got a scholarship that's specifically available for African American students, we don't know who those students are to give them literature about the available scholarships," Landwehr explained. "For those kinds of things - not admissions decisions, but other recruitment-based efforts - it's fantastic.
"I think our ability to target students of color now, especially at the prospect stage, will just become a little easier and more flexible and hopefully beneficial to the students because now they can get the information that might be helpful to them."
Landwehr said that the MnSCU policy barring race questions on admissions applications is unusual, compared to standards in other states.
"Any time we go to conferences, people are blown away that you can't ask race information in Minnesota," she said.
In her experience, many colleges in other states still ask for both race and birth date information on admissions applications. Applications for MnSCU schools do not ask applicants for their birthdays to prevent age discrimination.
"I think Minnesota is ahead of the game in saying, 'We don't want to know anything about you that you don't want to tell us,'" Landwehr said, "because then there's no room for error that we made a decision based on some information that we knew about you."
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USA Today and the Associated Press contributed to this story.
ON THE INTERNET
Read the Supreme Court's opinions on the Web at www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/02slipopinion.html. The law school case is Grutter v. Bollinger, 02-241. The undergraduate case is Gratz v. Bollinger, 02-516
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